Marvel's Runaways, Season 1, Episode 3: Destiny
The plot thickens with episode 3 of the Runaways. We still know precious little about just what Pride is doing, other than it involves some mixture of Tina Minoru's magic staff, Victor's weird time-machine-coffin-thing, and the strange mummy-like almost-corpse that Leslie keeps in her basement (which the human sacrifice is apparently supposed to bring back to life or some shit), off limits to her non-Pride husband. But this time around, Runaways explores the storylines of both parent and child, and it's... definitely interesting. Obviously not every parent gets equal treatment -- the Yorkeses are just a nice couple who happens to be involved in this strange cult, is funded by the efforts of their alleged friends, and also keep a
Yeah. Between of all the insanity that goes on with the kid superheroes and their cult-like parents, apparently a dinosaur pet is involved, and it's like their team mascot or something? Shit, is it wrong if I find it cuter than Lockjaw of the Inhumans? (It helps that Runaways is miles and miles of a better show and easily got me to like the characters far easier than Inhumans ever did).
This episode still takes the pacing relatively slow, but now that we're more invested with both parents and children as characters, we care a lot more about the tension that undercuts things as the kids all go on their own detective spree, and at least one pair of parents -- Catherine and Geoffrey Wilder -- is suspicious of the kids. Perhaps the episode's highest tension point was Catherine going off to interrogate Molly, with the threat of injecting her with a truth serum if necessary... while Molly has to deal with her, y'know, superpowers emerging and no one believing her when she tells them she's really strong and also there's a dinosaur in her basement, dismissing her because she's the 'kid' of the group. (It doesn't look like it due to their relative heights, but Molly's actress and character are both a couple of years younger than the rest of the Runaways). Molly's also the one that's the most confused about the thing in general, and manages to at least cook up a cover story about being confused about puberty and being dared to look into the study for liquor by the older kids (which is at least partially true). Catherine ends up not having the heart and goes into 'supportive aunt' mode, which is genuinely touching.
We actually get to see the funeral of Gene and Alice, Molly's parents, as a prologue to this episode. It's perhaps not super necessary, although it does raise a lot of questions. Did Pride -- or some members of Pride -- engineer their deaths because they knew too much or something? Victor (Chase's dad), Tina (Nico's mom -- who is noted to have a suspicious burn injury on her hand by Geoffrey) and Leslie (Karoline's mom*) certainly look to be some of the more ruthless members, so it's honestly not out of the question.
*I've spelled Karoline's name as 'Caroline' in my previous two reviews, but you can understand my mistake.
Also, to add to the general ruthlessness of the Pride members, we actually get Geoffrey and Catherine discuss about the truth/amnesia serum and so casually name-drop Frank Dean, telling us that his silly cluelessness is actually the byproduct of Pride covering their tracks. Some neat little storytelling there.
Meanwhile, in-between a whole lot of sexual teen tension (because, y'know, the whole high school drama thing), the Runaways discuss what's going on and the possibility that their parents are a murdering cult. Some want desperately to prove to themselves that their parents are innocent, some just want to find out the truth... and the fact that at least Chase and Nico don't have the most amiable relationships with their parents doesn't help out. Add that to Destiny turning up dead on a beach, and someone suggesting that maybe, just maybe, Amy Minoru, Nico's dead sister, is somehow connected to all this... yeah.
While Molly is off on her own (and getting interrogated by Catherine) the rest of the more older Runaways team up. There's a definite Gert/Chase/Karoline love triangle being thrown around as Gert tries to get herself paired up with Chase, while Alex tries none-too-subtly to get paired up with Nico. They all try and go off and investigate on their own... and, well, at least a couple of them end up finding out interesting stuff. Alex's attempt to muck around with the secret basement is fruitless because his father keeps bugging him (that telephone call bit was pretty tense, though) about girl problems, while Karoline investigates into Destiny with members of her church which ended up being redundant because the news reports Destiny's death anyway. Karoline also talks to other members of the church and kind of finds out that, surprise, no one glows like she does when she takes off her bracelet.
Gert and Chase gets to investigate Victor Stein's workshop only to find the time capsule empty. Gert gets to borrow a pair of X-Ray googles and, well, check out Chase's wang, and the show hangs a neat lampshade on male-vs-female objectification. And then they check out the Yorkes' basement and accidentally unleash the Deinonychus, who proceeds to bolt out and presumably attempt to unleash some Jurassic Park goodness onto the world.
Nico and Alex, meanwhile, ends up in a bit of a freak-out when Nico opens her mom's magical staff-wand and muck around with it, accidentally summoning a crapton of snow in her mom's office. I think we're getting into the superpowers a bit gradually -- so far only Molly and Nico are aware of their superpowers, although we know that at least Karoline has Dazzler powers. There was a hilarious bit when Tina comes home early, and Nico takes off her top and pretends that she's about to have sex with Alex so her mom won't question too much -- it's perhaps unnecessary (can't they just be studying together or some shit?) but it is the kind of thing that teens jacked up on hormones would think up of.
There's also a very touching moment where Nico, digging around in her mom's study and finding Amy's diary, ends up activating the magic staff by looking at one of those cute cut-out snowflakes that kids make.
The adults aren't faring much better, having their own drama. There's Leslie's clueless husband Dean trying to get higher up the ranking of the Church of Gibboris and trying to understand the mysterious meditating room, a holdover from the previous episode. But the big revelation here happens when a supposedly-romantic dinner between Robert and Tina Minoru ends up with Tina being a bit forward, giving Robert her panties mid-sushi and Robert gets absolutely creeped out by this sudden transformation from being distant to horny. It turns out, though, that Robert is the huge asshole because the moment he grabs a Lyft and buggers off... he goes into an apartment to fuck Chase's mom. Whose name I had to look up -- Janet Stein. Janet's only notable scene is a conversation with Victor, who heaps a fair amount of emotional abuse on her, so it's more than understandable that she'd look for solace elsewhere.
Victor, meanwhile, is pretty weird in this episode. I don't really get that much of a hang on him... I'm pretty sure he fucked up in the previous episode about body disposal, but I'm not sure if Destiny was actually still alive in the machine and Victor just did a regular killing and dumping or something.
Oh, and while they keep up appearances, just like any friendship-out-of-convenience, we get to see the Yorkes-es, the Wilders and the Minorus talk trash about each other out of earshot. In particular, Geoffrey Wilder, the affair couple and both Yorkes-es feel pretty unhappy about the whole deal and are just chomping at the bit to be out of Pride, which honestly leads me to wonder just why or how they joined in the first place. It all gets buried because these sort of developments need to be gradual, and right now Pride is super-duper scared that their ritual didn't worked and the creepy mummy man isn't getting better as they expected and they need another emergency sacrifice just as everyone is reeling from the last one.
There's a weak bit where Karoline's almost-rapists end up nearly beating the fuck out of Chase, which ends up with Chase kind of ditching his lacrosse team or something... considering how shoehorned the rape attempt was in the first episode, I really felt like they stumbled at trying to make it relevant even though Chase's dickwad buddies and his lacrosse career is completely superfluous to the rest of the story.
Still, despite the somewhat-rocky pacing and some parts of the high-school tropes being a bit blah, the series ends up feeling promising and having an energy that I really haven't seen in a superhero TV show in quite some time. Perhaps part of it is simply due to how developed the villains are (because, y'know, they have to double as the kids' parents) but I really think that I like this show far more than I expected to. So yeah, pretty cool episode, even if it's still slow and focused on buildup... but when you got a dozen characters to introduce at the same time you kinda have to do that.
No comments:
Post a Comment